ARLINGTON, Va.- The Arctic Ocean receives about 10 percent of

Earth’s river water and with it some 25 teragrams [28 million

tons] per year of dissolved organic carbon that had been held in

far northern bogs and other soils.

Now an international team of U.S. and German scientists,

including some funded by the National Science Foundation, have

used carbon-14 dating techniques to determine that most of that

carbon is fairly young and not likely to affect the balance of

global climate.

They reported their findings in the March issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a publication of the American Geophysical

Union.

Although the current carbon load does not seem likely to affect

global climate significantly, they caution in their report that a

well-documented Arctic warming trend could result in ancient

carbon-a reservoir of the gas currently locked into peat

bogs-being added to the mix and contributing to the well-

documented Arctic warming trend.

“If current warming trends in the Arctic continue, we can expect

to see more of the old carbon now sequestered in northern soils

enter the carbon cycle as carbon dioxide. This will act as a

positive feedback, tending to enhance the greenhouse effect and

accelerate global warming,” said Ronald Benner, an NSF-funded

researcher at the University of South Carolina.

NSF is an independent federal agency that supports fundamental

research and education across all fields of science and

engineering, with an annual budget of nearly $5.58 billion.

National Science Foundation funds reach all 50 states through

grants to nearly 2,000 universities and institutions.

The team studied rivers in northern Russia and Alaska, along with

the Arctic Ocean itself. Benner conducted some of his research as

part of the Western Shelf-Basin Interactions

research project, which is jointly funded by NSF and the U.S.

Office of Naval Research.

Previously, scientists had not known the age of the carbon that

reaches the ocean. Was it recently derived from contemporary

plant material, or had it been locked in soils for hundreds or

thousands of years and therefore not part of Earth’s recent

carbon cycle?

The new findings complement recently published work by Laurence

C. Smith, an NSF-funded researcher at the University of

California, Los Angeles, indicating that massive Siberian peat

bogs, widely known as the permanently frozen home of untold

kilometers of moss and uncountable hordes of mosquitoes, also are

huge repositories for gases that are thought to play an important

role in the Earth’s climate balance.

Those gases, carbon dioxide and methane, are known to trap heat

in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the enormous amounts of the gases

contained in the bogs haven’t previously been accounted for in

climate-change models.

The full story of that finding is here:

http://www.nsf.aov/od/lpa/news/O4/prO406.htm

To read an abstract of the full article in Geophysical Research

Letters, see

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004…/2003GLO19251.shtml

To read the full text of the AGU news release, see:

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/prrlO412.htm/.

What the researchers say:

“Many scientists are wondering whether current warming trends in

the Arctic will pick the lock on aged soil carbon and release

this material back into the active carbon cycle and the

atmosphere. Our results suggest this hasn’t happened yet, but we

need to monitor this situation closely using multiple

approaches.”-Ronald Benner, principal investigator.

NSF comments regarding the research discovery:

“Identifying the fate of carbon compounds mobilized from the vast

areas of frozen wetlands in the Arctic will be a critical step in

understanding the Arctic system and how it will respond to the

climatic forces acting upon it. How much carbon goes to the

ocean, and how much to the atmosphere and in what form, are key

questions we need to answer in order to see the directions the

future holds for us.”-Nell Swanberg, director of NSF’s Arctic

System Science(ARCSS) Program.

###

Ronald Benner, University of South Carolina, (803) 777-9561,

benner@biol.sc.edu

Jackie Grebmeier, University of Tennessee, (865) 974-2592,

jgrebmei@utk.edu

Laurence C. Smith, University of California, Los Angeles (310)

825-3154, Ismith@qeoq.ucla.edu

For more information about the Western Shelf-Basin Interactions

project, see http://sbi.utk.edu

The National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency

that supports fundamental research and education across all

fields of science and engineering, with an annual budget of

nearly $5.3 billion. National Science Foundation funds reach all

50 states through grants to nearly 2,000 universities and

institutions. Each year, NSF receives about 30,000 competitive

requests for funding, and makes about 10,000 new funding awards.

The National Science Foundation also awards over $200 million in

professional and service contracts yearly.